Self-described Maoist H. Bruce Franklin was fired from Stanford University in 1972 for speaking out against the Vietnam War, a landmark case of academic freedom. Over the next few decades, he wrote books on a wide variety of topics, including one that is said to have helped improve the ecosystem of New York Harbor. He died on May 19 at his home in El Cerrito, California, near Berkeley. He was 90 years old.
The cause was a rare brain disease called corticobasal degeneration, said his daughter, Karen Franklin.
Dr. Franklin was a tenured professor of English and the author of three scholarly books on Herman Melville when he became radicalized in the 1960s over the Vietnam War, a radicalization that was catalyzed by a year he spent in France, where he and his wife, Dr. Jane Franklin, met Vietnamese refugees whose relatives had been killed by the U.S. military.
“When we came back to this country, we were Marxist-Leninists and we recognized the need for a revolutionary force in the United States,” Dr. Franklin told The New York Times in 1972.
His far-left politics, even to the point of condoning violence, reflected the extremes sweeping the country and culture at the time, mixing revolutionary spectacle with genuine menace.
After returning to Stanford, Dr. Franklin and his wife helped organize a group called the Peninsula Red Guards. Dr. Franklin also served on the central committee of the Venceremos, a local organization promoting armed self-defense and the overthrow of the government.
During the Stanford campus unrest in February 1971, Dr. Franklin urged students to shut down “the most obvious machine of war,” the Stanford Computing Center, which was thought to be engaged in war-related work. A crowd broke into the building and cut off the power.
At the urging of university president Richard W. Lyman, the faculty senate voted to fire him for inciting violence.
Dr. Franklin responded by defiantly holding a press conference with his wife brandishing an unloaded M1 carbine to demonstrate, in a quote from Mao, that “political power emanates from there.”
His firing was the first firing of a tenured professor at a major university since the McCarthy era, and sparked a national debate about academic freedom. Alan M. Dershowitz, a young civil rights lawyer who was then spending a year at Stanford, argued that Dr. Franklin's speech to students was protected by the First Amendment. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling denounced it, calling it a “major blow to free speech.”
The New York Times editorial board disagreed. “His actions are cowardly and irresponsible, manipulative of students, endangering their own safety and damaging future careers,” the Times editorial said. “It turns vulnerable young men and women into puppets, while the instigator, a professor, seeks immunity from prosecution behind the shield of tenure.”
Dr. Franklin subsequently sued Stanford University, seeking back wages and reinstatement, but a California court upheld the university's decision.
As he wrote in his 2018 memoir, “Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War,” he was blacklisted for three years and rejected from employment by “hundreds of universities.”
He was eventually recruited by Rutgers University-Newark in 1975, and appointed John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies there a decade later. He remained at Rutgers until his retirement in 2016, publishing on a wide range of topics.
Vietnam was a recurring theme: in 1992, Dr. Franklin wrote “MIA: Or Myth-Making in America,” which examined the widely held, false belief that American soldiers were still being held prisoner in Indochina, a myth he argued was created by Hollywood, movies like “Rambo Part II,” and the Reagan administration to prevent normalization of relations with Communist Vietnam.
“Many Americans who still struggle to understand the origins and horrific legacy of the Vietnam War console themselves with legend,” Todd Gitlin wrote in the Times Book Review about Dr. Franklin's book. “His account leaves one wondering what they really missed about combat in Vietnam.”
Dr. Franklin has had a lifelong interest in science fiction and has explored how its so-called pulp themes are at the core of American culture. He has written one book on the work of Robert A. Heinlein and another on how such iconic 19th-century authors as Poe and Hawthorne dabbled in science fiction. In 1992, he served as special curator of the “Star Trek” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
After a period of active involvement in radical politics, he became a saltwater fisherman off the coast of New Jersey, and his interests expanded to include a book on menhaden, a key fish in the coastal food chain, titled “The Most Important Fish in the Sea” (2007).
The book raised awareness of the commercial overfishing of menhaden for fertilizer and livestock feed, leading the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to impose the first-ever catch limits in 2012. The limits are credited with helping to rebuild menhaden populations along the Atlantic coast and encouraging whales to return to New York Harbor to feed on the fish.
Howard Bruce Franklin was born in Brooklyn on February 28, 1934, the only child of Robert Franklin, who worked in a low-wage job on Wall Street, and Florence (Cohen) Franklin, who worked as a fashion illustrator for newspaper advertisements.
Bruce, as he was nicknamed, won a scholarship to Amherst College, the first in his family to attend college, where he alienated his more privileged classmates: “I despised them for everything from their crewcuts to their white-knit toes, but especially for all the stuffy tweedy hair in between,” he once told a group of college faculty.
After graduating summa cum laude in 1955, he worked as a tugboat steerer in New York Harbor. In 1956, he married Jane Ferby Morgan, who had grown up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina and worked in the intelligence department of the United Nations.
Dr. Franklin served three years in the Air Force as a Strategic Air Command navigator and squadron intelligence officer.
He was accepted into Stanford University's PhD English program, where he received his degree and was hired as an assistant professor of English and American literature in 1961. His first book, In the Wake of the Gods: Melville's Myths, was published in 1963 and continued to be published for several decades.
At the time, he considered himself a traditional Democrat, and he volunteered for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign.
But all that changed as America's involvement in Vietnam intensified. In 1966, Dr. Franklin led a campaign to close a napalm factory in San Francisco Bay that garnered national attention but was ultimately unsuccessful.
He considered himself a revolutionary, a term he defined as “someone who believes that the rich people running the country should be overthrown and that the poor working people should run the country,” according to Time magazine. In 1972, after being fired from Stanford University, he published Stalin Essentials: The Major Theoretical Works of Stalin, 1905-1952.
In an interview with The Times that month, Dr. Franklin denied harboring Mr. Beatty but praised the violent acts that led to his escape.
“We believe that most people in prison shouldn't be in prison. Bank robbery is not a crime, drug possession is not a crime,” he said, “and we believe that people in prison should be released by whatever means necessary.”
Several members of Venceremos were convicted of murder, but the charges against Dr. Franklin were dropped.
“My father was able to prove that Ronald Beatty was not where he said he was,” his daughter Karen said.
Dr. Franklin is survived by his wife, a forensic psychologist, his daughter Gretchen Franklin, a criminal lawyer, his son Robert, a physician, and six grandchildren. His wife, who wrote a book about Cuba-U.S. relations and led educational tours to Cuba, died in 2023 after 67 years of marriage.
Karen Franklin says she never asked her father if he regretted his comments about violently overthrowing the government. “I don't think he thought of himself as a Maoist or a Stalinist any more,” she says. “He was involved in national and international movements in the '60s and '70s. He was a leader in those movements, and he was drawn into those movements, and when those movements ended, his political views became more moderate.”